Profiting off mass incarceration is a dirty business. When private prison company Corrections Corporation of America squanders taxpayer money and runs facilities rife with human rights abuses, it's dragging its own name through the mud.

Under many civil asset forfeiture laws around the country, cops can take people's money and property without proving anyone guilty, or indeed without even making an arrest. The more they seize, the better off their departments are.

The country's biggest for-profit prison companies already pull in hundreds of millions of dollars a year locking up immigrants in federal custody. They stand to pull in even more money if the new laws generate lots of new prisoners.

Corizon is just one of the many powerful companies getting rich off mass incarceration. As long as Corizon is motivated by its bottom line rather than the health of prisoners, there will always be a perverse incentive to not provide treatment.

Prisoners are often housed hundreds of miles from their families, making phone the only way to connect on a routine basis. Global Tel*Link's high rates allow the company to profiteer off this basic human need.

Next week, it will be 50 years since Martin Luther King Jr. gave the "I Have a Dream" speech. He railed then against "the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination." Yet he could not have imagined that Jim Crow would soon be replaced with another oppressive system: mass incarceration.

The show demonstrates a solid commitment to generating empathy for prisoners and exposing the systemic problems that plague criminal justice in the United States. There are, however, deep problems with the criminal justice system that Orange does not raise.

Policymakers hoping to find meaningful offsets to fund disaster aid will have look at: 1) Where there's a lot of money, 2) where the spending is unjustifiable, and 3) where the politics and public opinion are conducive to allowing cuts, since there are very few areas in which that's true.

If a vindictive, biased justice system is irreconcilable with the Gospel, what is a Christian to do? The answer is first to get outraged -- a perfectly Christian emotion if it next leads to action that helps the powerless in their struggle for justice.

Word came out yesterday that Florida Atlantic University had sold the naming rights to its new football stadium to the GEO Group, which is the second largest private prison company in America. It now appears that the GEO Group decided to give its Wikipedia page a facelift.

The Romney ticket pledged this week to "retroactively" reverse any sequestration cuts to the Pentagon -- and push for the House budget that slashed funding for social programs, like food stamps -- all in an effort to protect profits for their war-profiteering friends.

What the Kochs want is to use their vast fortune to influence the political beliefs of people with a millionth their net worth, getting the middle class to buy into the notion that what's good for the rich is good for everyone.

The Koch-funded Right was effective at mobilizing against health care reform, but countless other activists, despite not being as well financed, made sure the Right didn't monopolize the debate. So today, we breathe a sigh of relief.

Might this act of selling out have something to do with the fact that the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation serves as an underwriter of the George Washington Forum, which is the OU group hosting the speech?

Given this set of facts, the sheer reach of the Koch brothers in the movement to overturn health care reform is staggering. They have seeded and cultivated the very network of organizations that's now threatening to undo the most significant progressive reform in a generation.